Automating Email and SMS flows

Joel Oliveira

May 4 2020

Posted in Best Practices

The easiest way to make Email and SMS work for you

When we launched our Email and SMS channels last year, we were aiming to bring you the best cost-effective solution on the market. Five months and millions of messages later, we are confident that we've created a robust alternative to all the traditional providers out there.

In this post, I would like to unveil how you can automate your promotional and transactional messages with minimal disruption to your current strategy while benefiting of features like multi-language, scheduling, throttling, event-driven triggers or dynamic content.

Quick Start

With Notificare, there is no concept of lists. Instead, you are able to enrich your users' profiles with email or SMS contacts. In addition to App & Web push devices, user profiles can also contain several email addresses or mobile phone numbers. An easy way to automate how you import these from other sources, like your CRM, is by using our Scheduled Tasks or Import Jobs.
Anyone, without any coding knowledge, can quickly add these to existing users or simply create new profiles. To keep things simple, from day one, we've decided to adopt CSV as our default format when creating manual or automated import jobs in Notificare. This is a format that is familiar to a wide range of professionals, and the majority of the Customer Relationship Management systems out there widely supports it.

Of course, you can always integrate with other parties using RESTful APIs. Still, the ability to use CSV as a common format to import or export data into or from Notificare has proven to be very useful to our clients. It is a great option, if you simply cannot justify the investment in tailor-made software development, nor you have the skills or time to do so.

Because of that, importing CSV files, remains, by far, the most used mechanism to import GBs of data into Notificare. For example, importing email contacts, would require a CSV file that looks like this:

Once you have your initial user base imported into Notificare, you can then use our Scheduled Tasks to create hourly or daily imports of new contacts.

Multi-Language Templates

Another great feature of our App & Web Push, Email, and SMS features is the ability to create multi-language templates. By assigning a language to your contacts, it is pretty easy to deliver highly engaging messages in the language your users' language with one single campaign.

By using our smart message composers, you can quickly create templates with localized content, which can then be used to streamline your campaigns whenever you see fit. For example, a multi-language email template would look like this:

And a SMS template like this:

While these templates allow you to reach users in their native languages, they also allow you to provide an effective fallback to the most common language you use. This way, you can make sure you still offer a decent approach for those languages that you can't provide content for.

Dynamic Content

Another great feature of our templates is the ability to include placeholders for dynamic data. This turns out to be one of the most powerful features available in our Import Jobs or Automation Connectors. Personalization is one of the most influential techniques for higher conversions. You can get 20% more conversions when you design your templates with some form of personalization while at the same time being able to provide the right content within the right context.

While designing your templates, you will easily see yourself personalizing certain sections of your content, either by addressing users by their name, by displaying their current loyalty score or by providing exclusive discount codes:

Once you've designed the perfect template with dynamic placeholders, using our Scheduled Tasks or Import Jobs you can put it all to work by simply proving your dynamic data via a CSV file:

Depending on the approach you would like to have for communication, you can either use our Batch Private Message Imports (great for transactional messages) or Batch Grouped Message Imports (perfect for promotional messages where measuring conversion is your goal) to actually deliver your multi-language and/or dynamic content to your customers.

Event-Driven Interactions

Another great way to implement a transactional or promotional messaging strategy with minimal impact in your organization is by using our Automation add-on. It is also a powerful way of creating meaningful interactions, in real-time, with your customers.

Great examples of these interactions are:

Shopping cart abandonment

Order confirmation & shipping information

Product scarcity

Customer nurturing

Purchase incentives

Client feedback

Independently of what industry your business fits in, creating moments of delight, convenience, storytelling, or customer education are simple rules to live by. It can also be an overwhelming task to strategize, define and execute, and this is where our automation connectors become extremely important.

By providing event tracking mechanisms that can be triggered by both your client facing applications (your website or mobile app) or by your back-end applications (e-commerce platform, CRM, sales software, etc) you can use Notificare to capture these signals and transform them into invaluable interactions that will take your email and SMS efforts to new heights.

Pretty much like our import features, event-driven interactions can be configured to provide a multi-language support and dynamic content using a friendly interface allowing you to deploy, pause and measure your all-year round, seasonal or ephemeral marketing campaigns.